


Mothers' Day

by MayContainBlueberries



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen, Mention of Character Death, mention of illness, mention on cancer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 18:11:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1867521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayContainBlueberries/pseuds/MayContainBlueberries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nita and Dairine deal with a small problem with the Motherboard...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mothers' Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [themerrygentleman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themerrygentleman/gifts).



The early May sun broke through the clouds on Sunday, the first really warm day of the year.   
“Don’t get used to it,” Nita warned Dairine, “It’s back to cold rain for the next week.”  
But it was lovely and warm for now, and it didn’t seem that surprising when Harry said, “What do you girls say to a picnic?”  
It didn’t seem that surprising, that is, until you realized it was Mothers’ Day. And that the Callahans hadn’t had a picnic in ages. It had been a tradition every Mothers’ Day, rain or shine. Recently though it had been… difficult.   
Still – “I’ll make sandwiches!” Nita said.  
“I’ll brew us up some coffee,” Harry said.  
“Tea for me please,” Nita interjected.  
“Dari,” Harry said, “could you pull the picnic blanket out of the linen closet?”  
“Sure thing,” Dairine scrambled up the stairs.   
Spot spopped out of her room, trailing her to the linen closet.  
"Dairine?" he nudged up against her leg.  
"What's up?" She asked, scooping him up.  
"You need to take a look at this..." Spot flipped open and showed Dairine a page of error notifications.   
"What --" her heart sank to her stomach as she read, and she forgot all about the picnic blanket.  
"Neets!" She yelled.  
“What!”  
“I need you up here!”  
Dairine heard her trudging up the stairs. “Can’t find the blanket?” Nita asked.  
"No… uh. There's a problem... um... with the Motherboard..." Dairine felt shaky. "Some virus or something. It's affecting all the mobiles too... they’re like… glitching out, crashing…”  
Nita peered over at Spot’s screen, “Do you have any idea what kind of virus?”  
“The mobiles tried to run some diagnostics…” Dairine lapsed into silence.   
The Motherboard couldn’t be dying. But that was what the readings seemed to indicate. The mobiles had been combatting the virus, but it just mutated around them, spreading and growing until they could do nothing, just watch as it grew like…  
“It’s like a cancer,” Dairine whispered.  
Nita glanced sharply at her. Dairine knew she was thinking the same thing. Oh god. This sounds familiar.  
“How long has this been going on?” Nita asked, business like.  
“A while… a few months… I don’t get why they didn’t tell me anything!”  
“Likely they didn’t want to worry you,” said Nita. “You’ve been busy lately.”  
“I have to go over,” Daririne said, already readying a transit spell. “Can you explain to dad –”  
“Explain to him yourself,” Nita replied, “I’m coming with you.”  
Thank the powers, Dairine thought. But she said, “You don’t need to…”  
“Shut up, ‘course I’m not letting you go alone,” Nita started back downstairs. “I’ll talk to dad.”

The transit, as always, left Nita and Diarine out of breath and shaking. When they regained their composure, they stood on the smooth silicone surface of the Motherboard. Nothing stirred in the gentle silence of the vacuum.   
“Where is everyone?” Nita asked, looking around.   
“I dunno…” Darine said. Guys? She asked in her head. Where are you all?  
Dairine? Someone said, faintly.  
There was a pop behind them and a few mobiles appeared.   
Dairine? A mobile asked again. Gigo, Dairine noted.  
“Hey small stuff,” She said, hunkering down. “What’s up?”  
Dairine? He said.  
“Yeah. Yeah it’s me buddy.”  
The small group of mobiles froze, out of the blue, with not so much as a heads up.  
“Guys?” Dairine choked.  
“Dairi, what’s up?” Nita asked, looking at the immobile mobiles.   
“I don’t know… Spot?”  
Spot flipped open his laptop to display a scrolling page of 1’s and 0’s. “They’re just sending nonsense, mostly. I think they’ve shut down.”  
“Anything you can pull out of that that might be useful?” Nita asked.  
Dairine was thankful for her sister taking control right then. She was week and shaking. The mobiles all just shut down? What was happening?  
“Nothing really,” Spot replied. “The only repetition is this one string.” He displayed it up on the screen: 01110111011010010111010001101000.  
“Anything from the Motherboard?” Nita asked.   
If a computer could wrinkle its nose, Spot would have then, “The Motherboard doesn’t really say much. Anything happens through the Mobiles… I can try though.”  
Dairine already had her hands pressed flat to the planet’s surface, feeling the inner working, all that circuitry, all those signals pinging around like little lost fireflies…  
She didn’t notice that Nita had crouched down next to her until she felt her sister’s hand on her back. “Dairi?”  
Dairine looked over, “Yeah?”  
Nita grimaced, “I really don’t what to mess too much with… but maybe if I could…” She sighed. “Do you have any idea where the Motherboard’s kernel might be?”  
Dairine stretched her mind into the heart of the planet. Here, she said silently, gesturing with her mind. I’ll grab it… She reached into the motherboard, mostly with her mind, although her hand sunk a bit beneath the surface.   
“Here,” she said, out loud now, holding out the tangle of Speech and intent.   
“We can probably use it for diagnostic purposes, if nothing else,” Nita said.  
“Go for it,” Dairine replied, holding out the Kernel to her sister. “You’ve had more practice…”  
Nita looked at her sharply, “It’ll be fine, alright? It won’t be like…”  
“I know,” Dairine said. “I know I’m sorry. I’m just… worried.”  
Nita balanced the Kernel in her hand, and gave Dairine a one armed hug. “We got this, squirt.”  
“Hey,” Dairine smiled weakly. “I’m taller than you, you know.”  
Nita shoved her back playfully. “Okay. Let’s debug this giant-ass computer.”

A few hours later, both girls were exhausted and frustrated.   
“I don’t get it!” Nita shouted, nearly throwing the kernel away in frustration – again. “It has to come from somewhere!”  
Dairine flicked through pages of output on Spot’s screen, “It has to be external… Look,” she gestured at a set of characters in the Speech, “This is one of the ‘centre points’ we’ve isolated, right?”  
The virus – or whatever it was – seemed to be centred around a few specific structures in the motherboard. However, it did not appear to originate from these structures, just to converge on them.  
“It looks like something’s feeding the virus into those points, and then it’s spreading out from there…”  
Nita poked at another bit of the screen, “But look, there’s no signature from an outside source… It’s got the Motherboard’s signature all over it.”  
“It has to have originated from the Motherboard,” Spot put in, “or something directly derived from the Motherboard…”  
“But,” Dairine put in, “but there’s no source!”  
“It could be hidden or disguised,” Spot countered.  
“We’ve been searching for ages,” Nita said. “It would have to be hidden really well. Like by a wizard or something…”  
Spot binged softly, like he’d gotten a notification, “Ah.” He said. “Uh-oh.”  
Dairine looked at him. “Derived from the Motherboard…”  
“And a wizard,” Spot finished.  
“The mobiles,” Dairine said, not wanting to believe it.   
Nita shook her head, “No way. No way they would’ve done that. They had to know it would affect them as well. And they couldn’t have all been,” she shuddered, “overshadowed. We would have much bigger problems on our hands. You know what they’re capable of!”  
“Not all of them,” Dairine said, “but maybe one or two. They could keep hidden. No-one would know until it was too late, probably. And the Lone One doesn’t care who It takes down along the way, even Its own servants.”  
“But – how can we find out who it was?” Nita said. “The mobiles have shut down…”  
“They’ve still got to have some memory, right?” Dairine said.  
“Anything older than a few days is deep copied to all of them,” Spot said. “Newer memory is not saved as accurately. References are being shuffled.”  
“But the virus started before then! Even if it had been wiped…”  
“The wizardry would leave some trace, yes,” Spot said. “I can look through all of them from about the time the virus started. This may take a while.”

 

“Well this is familiar,” Spot said, sometime later.  
Dairine looked up blearily from Nita’s manual, which the sisters had been hunched over, reading up on computer viruses of all shapes and sizes.   
“Did you – are you done?” she asked, taking off her glasses to rub her eyes.   
“Yes,” Spot replied. “I found the source of the virus. It’s our old friend, Logo.”  
Dairine stared in shock, “No. But he wasn’t… he was fine after Reconfiguration happened. The Lone Power wasn’t speaking through him anymore.”  
“True,” Spot said, “but perhaps having That One in his head before made it easier for him to be overshadowed this time.”  
“Okay,” said Nita, standing up and brushing down her jeans, “what have we got to do?”

It wasn’t too hard to find Logo, following his digital footprints to where he sat, like all the other mobiles, apparently lifeless.   
“Wake him up?” Nita asked Spot.  
“On it,” the computer replied.  
Logo whirred, like an engine starting and then faltering, and then stood up on his many legs. For a moment he stood there, as though surveying his immediate area. Then he began to laugh, and Dairine went cold.   
That was the laugh of her nightmares, the laugh she heard when her eyes were closed and she remembered the dark, the crushing pressure, being scared and alone and confused… the laugh that she had heard all throughout her ordeal.   
And Dairine started to get mad, “What are you doing here!?” She demanded. “Wasn’t getting your butt kicked once enough? Don’t you remember what happened last time you tried to mess with this planet?”  
“The Lone Power is not here,” Logo said. “I am just Its servant.”  
“Of course It’s here!” Dairine shouted. “It’s wherever there is entropy, and you’ve done a great job of bringing whole lot of entropy down here. Did you think It would spare you if you helped It? What did It promise you? I bet It didn’t tell you that you would share the same fate as your siblings!”  
“Listen, Logo,” Nita said, calmer, “Whatever It promised you, It broke Its word. You can still fix this. You can wake up the Motherboard, and heal yourself.”  
“I am not broken,” Logo said. “I was spared.”  
Dairine shook her head in disgust, “You poor sucker. You think the Lone One would take any time to spare you? It doesn’t care about you! You were just a pawn, and now that you’ve done your job It doesn’t need you anymore.”  
“No!” Logo said.  
“Look,” Nita said, “you weren’t spared. We woke you up to get answers. If your programming is so corrupt that you can’t see even that, I’m not sure you could be of any help to us…”  
“No,” Logo repeated, fainter.  
“Spot,” Dairine said.  
“On it,” Spot replied, and fed Logo a series of images. Mobiles breaking down. The code they desperately sent. Logo himself as they had first found him, useless, run down.   
“No,” Logo whispered one more time.  
“Please,” Dairine said. “Please stop this. Fix what you’ve done.”  
There was an agonizing silence. None of them dared move. Logo stood, still as a statue.   
He’d not gonna, Dairine thought, or he can’t…  
They heard a pop from behind them, and spun. A collection of a few hundred mobiles stood.  
“Guys?” Dairine said, dropping to her knees. “Are you guys okay?”  
“We’re fine, we’re all better,” a mobile named Elizabeth II said.  
“We have to thank our brother, Logo,” another, Beanpole, added.  
The mobiles swarmed around Dairine, still kneeling, and Nita, standing behind her holding Spot. They crowded around Logo, beeping and buzzing out their thanks. Nita, Dairine and Spot moved off a ways, watching the mobiles.  
“Logo got rid of the virus so quickly,” Nita noted.  
“There was a kind of loose end, somewhere in the code,” Spot said. “If you didn’t know where it was, it would take years to find, even with the fastest processing that we have… But if you know where it is, it just takes a tug and the whole thing falls apart.”  
“And Logo knew,” Nita marveled, “even with his memory shot to bits. And unravelling the virus ‘cured’ everything automatically?”  
“More or less,” Spot replied. “It fixed the major problems, I believe.”  
Gigo wandered over to where the stood. "With?" He inquired.  
Dairine grinned, and scooped him into her arms. "All good, small stuff?"  
"Yes," he replied. "It is all better. There are some more permanent errors in the motherboard, but we will work together to fix those. Thank you for all you did."  
"It was down to Logo in the end," Nita said. "We couldn't have done squat if he hadn't come around."  
"Yes. It was brave of Logo to risk angering the Lone Power. The action of a truly good wizard," Gigo said. "Unfortunately, the Powers don't quite agree. Logo has lost his wizardry."  
Dairine inhaled sharply, "What?"  
"They are concerned," Spot added. "Logo willingly let the Lone One control him. While he gave up that association willingly, what is to say he will not stray again?"  
"That's so unfair!" Nita exclaimed. "He saved the entire planet!"   
"It's okay," said another voice. Logo had followed Gigo over. "I understand. I sped up entropy quite a bit."  
"But you're sorry, aren't you?" Dairine argued. "They should give you another chance!"  
"I don't deserve that right now. And I can still make up for my mistakes. I may not be able to perform wizardry, but I can write programs and do research and help my siblings when they are on errentry."  
Dairine wrinkled her nose, "I guess."   
Logo chuckled, not the cold laugh of the Lone Power, but a proper computer laugh, all buzzes and booleans. "I will be fine, Dairine. We all will. And we have you three to thank for that."   
Nita waved her hand, "You healed the motherboard."  
"And you reminded me why I needed to," Logo replied.  
Dairine put Gigo back down, "You guys are sure you are okay?"  
"Of course," Gigo said.  
"Well, call if you need anything," Dairine said.  
"Go well," Logo said.  
"Dai stiho," Nita and Dairine replied.

It was dark when they got home. The screen door slapped behind them.  
"Daddy?" Nita called.  
"How are they?" He asked, coming into the kitchen.  
"Good," Dairine said. "They're fine..." she was shaking again. Her Dad caught her in a big bear hug. Nita joined in, and they stood in the kitchen, clinging to each other.   
"So," Harry said, when they let each other go. "What about that picnic?"   
Dairine grinned, and whispered, "Happy mother's day."


End file.
